by Alastair Bland
Could the key to good health and a robust global environment be located within 100 miles of your front door? The five co-owners of Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley believe so. Since June of 2006 this “community-supported kitchen”––the first cooperative of its kind anywhere––has been preparing and delivering ready-made foods to the homes of over 100 Bay Area residents who believe in the company's goals of minimizing one's ecological footprint, living socially, eating locally and eating well.
Co-owners Misa Koketsu, Porsche Combash, Catherine Spanger, Larry Wisch and Jessica Prentice are the founders of Three Stone Hearth. Located on the west side of the tracks in Berkeley's industrial center, the company functions primarily as a food prepping facility. The staff, several trained chefs, a dishwasher, culinary school interns and numerous volunteers spend six days each week reviewing customer orders, cooking meals and packing them for delivery, with a seated lunch dividing each workday. By purchasing grains, meats, produce, and dairy products from organic farmers within a 100 or so miles, the kitchen has cut big-business agriculture out of the lives of scores of people and is a concept based on the hugely popular nationwide program of “community supported agriculture,” or CSA.
Prentice explains that the CSA system came about as a direct and very successful reaction to factory-scale agriculture.
“There's meanwhile been a factory approach to food processing, and our CSK (community supported kitchen) is a response to that.”
Public response to the efforts of Three Stone Hearth has been fast and enthusiastic in the Bay Area, and co-owner Wisch has very high hopes for the business's future.
“The idea is to make more of these community supported kitchens. We want to create a greater demand so that our small farmers don't have to worry about marketing their goods. We see ourselves as a prototype for something we hope can spread across the country. So many people have already been forced off of small farms by mass, corporate farms. We're trying to reverse that, paying farmers a fair wage for what it costs to raise these animals and plants.”
The cost of a week's worth of prepared food from Three Stone Hearth is relatively high, acknowledges Wisch. A pint of green sauerkraut is $10, which includes a one-dollar deposit for the glass jar, money which the company credits back to the customer upon the container's return. A one-pound bag of whole grain breakfast cereal is $8.50. A quart of stew is usually $15 to $17. All this, however, reflects the true price of mankind's impacts on the planet and the true value of highly nutritious, naturally grown food.
“If all food was properly priced, and if it all accounted for health care, oil usage and pollution and didn't have government subsidies, you'd be paying what we charge,” Wisch explains.
Prentice thinks likewise.
“American society has lost sight of the value of food. People want it to be cheap, and people think it should be cheap, and people don't want to spend time preparing it. Food is totally undervalued now. We spend lots of money on entertainment devices, cell phones, technology and $200 shoes, but somehow real food is considered only a luxury rather than an absolute necessity.”
Wisch recovered from a life-threatening cancer experience several years ago, a fortunate turnaround that correlated to a shift on his part to heightened levels of food and dietary awareness, and Wisch considers a sound diet to be the key to any individual's good physical health. That, in turn, is conducive to societal health, which feeds back into a person's spiritual health. On top of everything rests global environmental health, and all of it boils back down to the kitchen. At Three Stone Hearth, the staff prepares only “nutrient dense” foods, or those containing the very highest concentrations of crucial nutrients; calories are not wasted on empty flavor. That means mineral-rich bone broth, slow-fermented sauerkraut, agave syrup, whole grains, and plenty of humanely-raised meats and internal organs, which often find their way into exceptionally nutritious hamburger patties.
It may, in fact, come as a surprise to some health advocates and environmentalists that Three Stone Hearth does not endorse a meat-free diet. The kitchen's dietary guidelines stem in part from the research of Weston A. Price, a dentist who traveled the world in the early 20th century, studying numerous small and isolated communities while hunting for the secret to healthy teeth. Among other things, he discovered that meat-eating people are generally far more robust than vegetarians.
“I don't want to say that vegetarianism is bad, but we don't think that it's a healthy way to live. Price was looking all over for a healthy, purely vegetarian society, but he didn't find any.”
While healthy, organically grown foods are crucial to the Berkeley cooperative's objectives, a warm and social cooking experience is just as valued. So is the act of eating, and to promote the community's involvement in Three Stone Hearth's activities, a “Full Moon Feast” takes place approximately every month. An adjacent space is rented out for the evening, and the staff arranges seating for 100 people, many of whom are recipients of the weekly food deliveries.
“Part of what we're doing is bringing communities back to food and food sharing,” says Wisch. “There's a lot of alienation today in society where eating and food origins are involved. We're about joining together both to make a meal and to eat it. When you make a meal for two people, it can be a hassle. But if you get together and do the same meal for 100, it's fun. It's community-making.”
Three Stone Hearth delivers to homes around the greater Bay Area, and on Wednesday from 5 to 7 p.m. and Thursday morning from 10 a.m. to noon customers may drop in to purchase wholesome pantry items like Celtic sea salt, sprouted spelt flour, ghee and coconut oil. The menu changes each week and often adheres to a national theme, like Mexican, Indian, Italian, Korean and many more. The week's offerings can be viewed on the company's Web site, and customers can make their orders electronically.
Of course, organic quality foods can be found elsewhere, but they aren't always truly “good” foods. Organic fruits and vegetables may come from distant hemispheres and some “certified organic” foods come from questionable sources. Whole wheat breads and cereals often consist largely of refined flour, sugar and corn syrup. But Three Stone Hearth promotes goodwill, honesty, transparency and the guarantee that customers are getting the best nutrition available without compromising environmental integrity.
With any luck, says Wisch, the principles of Three Stone Hearth will prove contagious and spread across the nation.
“We're a prototype. We want to train people in Santa Cruz, Portland, San Francisco and other places to do this. They'd be on their own, totally self-governed but sharing our knowledge and what we've learned. We're already halfway to proving that this system works, and it looks like it will work.”
For more information on Three Stone Hearth's services and their Full Moon Feasts, visit them at www.threestonehearth.com or email info@threestonehearth.com.
Yoga with a Heart
by Bente Mirow
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As it was written in the Hindu scriptures Shiv Puranas thousands of years ago, the purpose of Rasa yoga or Rasa Sadhana was ultimate love. To experience the highest possible level of love where all is bliss was an arduous journey not undertaken by the meek or those easily tempted by human folly. Rasa love was meant as love for Krishna, God, and the recipe for this training was kept secret, so as not to cause harm to those who would be tempted to skip a step or two.
Fortunately many have found ways to aspire to higher love during these thousands of years past, using ancient ways and wisdom no longer shrouded in secrecy, whether such secrets of long ago were part of revelation or not.
In our fast and now highly different world, such love is the focus between people; for example, as in such a quaint approach as within a relationship.
But is that possible?
“Love alone is capable of uniting you as partners in such a way as to complete and fulfill you; for love alone takes you and joins you together with that which is deepest within you.” So say Ellis Gold and Lila Skye of Equal Partner Yoga in Berkeley, California.
Together they have developed a spiritual practice that encourages you to dissolve the boundaries that create separation in relationship, while simultaneously remaining true to yourself
So many thoughts come to my mind: just how difficult it is to find ways to learn to know ourselves, embrace ourselves, so that we may embrace another; the inevitable and indefinite separateness as part of the human experience; the yoga practice which is like playing with Lego blocks, only by adding one block at a time can you create the structure; and relationship, life's hardest challenge.
At Equal Partner Yoga union is the focus. But a union built from quality in oneself first, leading to a transformation of the individual within the partnership. Surrender is a prerequisite and yoga is the vehicle.
Gold and Skye provide a space for people to confront themselves with a partner, and help them discover limitations within their bodies and psyches, which they may be able to develop, transform or re-create. When the bodies and the intent of the psyches are in alignment, something happens. Something alchemical that is not achieved by yoga alone, by communication alone, or by shared philosophies.
Partner poses which allow two people to create beauty with their physical bodies, always being in touch with the other by direct contact, gentle communication and fun are elements brought together by Gold and Skye through skillful guidance.
Equal Partner Yoga is part therapy and part yoga. Gold and Skye are quick to point out that they are not therapists, but are facilitating self-therapy for people to discover their own limits.
I still have questions. What if a couple gets into a snag? How do you encourage communication within this practice? Do you interfere?
Gold explains how by agreement in a class or workshop a raised hand means a call for one or both of the teachers. They then ask for permission to facilitate and only do so where both partners are comfortable.
“New things may show up in a relationship. It is important to listen to our own bodies and know when something doesn't feel good or right,” says Gold. Skye adds that they encourage direct communication as opposed to implied or covert communication, anticipating the revelation of self through story.
I am impressed with their approach and the feedback I read from former participants in their classes and workshops. People leave in awe at having touched their partner through yoga poses while expressing their feelings with intent. They are delighted to have discovered new dimensions and movements in their partner, and enriched from breaking open their own limitations to openness, gratitude and the ability to express themselves from their heart. They praise the teachers for their gentle ways, their compassion, understanding, and ability to guide.
Boundless gratitude is what one woman comes away with.
And as if they could read my mind, which is lingering on thoughts that it sounds too perfect––where is there room for major flaws or issues? Is this only for the already nearly perfect individual or couple? Just then Gold reveals a little secret, which I'm not prepared for.
“I want you to know,” he says, with a silent voice and eyes full of peace, “that Lila and I are both very violent people. We both have deep seated issues with violence and rage.”
I'm stunned. And now seriously impressed.
Not until Gold had a heart attack and quadruple bypass heart surgery, now more than 20 years ago, and after a life of using violence as a means of communication, did he find yoga and the relative peace within that has followed.
Gold suggests that Skye tell her own story, and she hands me a typewritten sheet from her journal from last year. She too exudes peacefulness. I feel honored and I don't read it until I get home.
A rage that has permeated her life since childhood is expressed and she discovers at age 49 how it has manifested and expressed itself through her. A powerful write-up by any standard, the admissions of what she sees as less than desirable behavior towards other, especially her family, is faced and dissolved. She has given this write-up to those people and I am awed at her power where she describes herself as exhibiting victim behaviors.
The two met in 2001 when Gold placed an ad on a local bulletin board hoping to find a fellow yoga teacher to teach partner yoga with. Skye was not the only one who responded, but she was the right one. As they started building an idea of what they wanted to do, and developed some of their own poses (which can all be viewed on their Web site), they found they had many personal similarities. The partnership extended itself into couple hood, a journey they both make clear has been far from easy.
Suddenly I see their service in a whole new light. Where I was impressed before with their seemingly perfected system of integrating physical, mental and spiritual approaches for two people to find a higher level of understanding and love, I now see something completely different. I see an unassuming, compassionate and wise couple offering people, any people, ways in which to deepen their love for each other by helping themselves together with simple and profound tools.
And not just within a male/female relationship. Any two people are a union: couples, friends, family. Love has many expressions, romantic, mutual enjoyment, honoring another. The key is knowing how to love. “To love one is an enchanting exercise in loving all.”
Equal Partner Yoga is turning the old picture on its head. The Rasa love is no longer achievable only by the few, no longer achievable only by means of that last Lego block, and God is no longer the only possible recipient of the deepest love. At Equal Partner Yoga, Rasa is accessible to us all, to give to and receive from each other. And Gold and Skye have demonstrated that the greatest wisdom and the highest love also can be found in the first building block if we care to look and share
Gold is a certified Dharma Yoga Teacher, registered with the National Yoga Alliance. Skye has teaching certificates in Ashtanga Yoga and Dharma Yoga. Don't miss their Roses and Poses Valentine's Playshop on Sunday, February 11th at The Mindful Body Yoga Studio in San Francisco, where they teach every other Friday. Other workshops are available from their studio in Berkeley, and they will travel to other locations. For class schedules, visit www.equalpartneryoga.com. Bente Mirow is a freelancer who writes what her heart and mind demand. She can be reached at hyggemer@netscape.net.